I love Roger Smith’s watches. If I won the lottery tomorrow (or had I won it this past weekend, when the Powerball reached a high of $1.7 billion), my first call wouldn’t be to a banker, or a lawyer, or even to my family. There’s a very real chance my first call would be to Roger Smith to beg for a spot on his very long waitlist — I might not even wait to cash the check to start dialing.
I tell you this not because this is an article about how my watch collecting would change were I to come into an inconceivable amount of money overnight (though that might be a fun game to play at some point), but because Roger Smith has just announced the Series 6, his first new model since 2019, and the watch I am undoubtedly most excited about this year, even if it may be some time before I get to see one.
The Series 6, like all Smith’s watches, is clear in its origin, building on the vocabulary steadily developed by Smith over the last few decades. In execution, the watch is most closely linked to the Series 4, a triple calendar with moon phase wrist watch introduced in 2015 that set itself apart not only in craftsmanship (a given for Smith) but in layout. That watch introduced a floating central dial with a radial date display, complete with “traveling aperture.” This evolution of the pointer date made the Series 4 incredibly legible, and strikingly modern, despite the classical styling.
With the Series 6, Smith has brought the “traveling aperture” to a comparatively accessible model, dropping the day, date, and moon phase, but keeping the instantaneous date jump at midnight and small seconds. This new design is made possible by the introduction of a new caliber, which, like the watch, is not only stunningly beautiful but also (as with most movements designed on the Isle of Man) technically remarkable, and the resulting watch is undeniable.
So what is it about Roger Smith’s watches that makes them so special? I could easily point to the technical achievement that is the single wheel Co-Axial escapement that Smith has evolved from George Daniels’ original Co-Axial escapement, or the sheer magic that comes from building any watch in the “Daniels’ Method,” where a single watchmaker makes an entire watch — from the screws to the case — from start to finish by hand.
Or it could be the “where” they are made, that these watches are born out of an entirely different tradition than any other independent watchmaker working today. It’s not that the techniques are entirely different (although in places they are) or that the technology is wildly foreign (other than the use of the Co-Axial escapement), but rather that the “coaching tree” that led to Roger Smith is wholly distinct from the Swiss-centric tree that has produced most of the world’s other preeminent independent watchmakers.
Today, independent watchmaking is centered primarily in Switzerland. I don’t just mean that geographically, but culturally as well. Since the First World War, watchmaking — or at least high-end mechanical watchmaking — has primarily been thought of as a Swiss pursuit. Sure, other pockets of the world (notably Japan and Germany in the 20th century, and now, increasingly, China) have made homes for themselves in mechanical watchmaking, but, generally, the industry has consolidated in Switzerland.
That’s had a few impacts. The first of these is that it’s just easier to make watches in Switzerland than it is in most other places. Core competencies — like the production of mainsprings — are highly specialized and are, in a world where clockworks power less and less, significantly less profitable for generalized manufacturing facilities. But that industrialization is still going strong in Switzerland, and local brands have easy access to suppliers, equipment, and institutional knowledge when things inevitably start to go wrong. None of that exists on the Isle of Man, and the result is watches that feel much closer in connection to Abraham Louis Breguet than to Rexhep Rexhepi, Simone Brette, or even Philippe Dufour.
The frosted gold plates and hand-engraved and turned details of Smith’s watches have a delightfully arcane feel to them. They still feel like contemporary watches, with all the sharpness and precision you’d expect from a modern independent masterpiece, but shaped by the historic pieces that populate the British Museum and London’s Science Museum (each of which boasts incredible exhibits on watchmaking). Put another way, Smith’s watches — and Daniels’ before him — don’t feel like successors to the 20th-century designs from the Patek Philippes of the world that modern Swiss watchmaking has blossomed out of.
I’ve been an admirer of Roger Smith and of his mentor, George Daniels, for nearly as long as I’ve been into watches. I first learned of the pair thanks to a 2012 auction catalog furnished for me by my grandfather (who worked at Sotheby’s and is in no small part responsible for fanning my obsession with watches). The catalog was from the sale of Mr. Daniels’ personal collection of watches and clocks and was staggering, with everything from Breguet (the watchmaker, not the brand) clocks, to a 5-digit Rolex modified to fit a Co-Axial escapement (one of the many proofs of concept that led to the industrialized Co-Axial calibers now found in Omega watches).
I lost my copy of the catalog to a flooded basement a few years ago (if someone has a spare and would like to be exceedingly generous, I’d be eternally grateful), but the mark it left on me has been indelible. That catalog was my first entrée into the world of independent watches (I’m pretty certain it was the first time I encountered the name “F.P. Journe”) and was a major resource for me just as I was diving into watches in a real way, and helped me fall in love with the work of George Daniels and, through him, Roger Smith.
Of course, there is a problem that comes with falling in love with objects like these; spend enough time with any masterpiece, and it begins to normalize itself. It’s why The Beatles may start to sound repetitive, or why you find yourself drifting to your phone on your umpteenth rewatch of Jaws. It’s not that you’ve forgotten it’s a masterpiece, but that status becomes the status quo. But find yourself in a packed theatre (like I did a few weeks ago) as the Jaws theme music fills the air, and you’ll find yourself quickly reminded of why you loved the movie in the first place.
The Series 6 is, for me, the Roger Smith equivalent of Jaws in that packed theater. It’s not that I’d forgotten how good Roger Smith was, but the Series 6 is a pretty great reminder not to forget it any time soon. Roger W. Smith
Griffin Bartsch
2025-09-15 13:00:00